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Showing posts with the label politics

The Uselessness of Centralized Economic Development and the Hope of UBI

   Content-Pixie-unsplash                                                                 In my home town on the rural coast of Maine,we once had an economic development council, but it was little more than a public-private consortium with a license to spend the public’s money in the manner of a private development corporation. The council spent taxpayer money on consultants and on advertising campaigns for down town hospitality businesses. For a while, after spending an amount of public resources, the council laid low, before announcing that it was reconvening. Shortly afterward, the pandemic hit, taking economic hospitality development off the table, and the council announced that it was closing down for good, with nary a mention that the economy was being impacted by a pandemic. The campaign talking points of local politicians habitually extol their high regard for history, creation of year round jobs, the need to attract families and young people to the region, and for affordable h

Who Do You Think You Are? A Voice from the People in Maine’s Pine Tree Zone Debate

Maine's Pine Tree Zone Tax Exemptions will be up for renewal again, scheduled to end in Dec 2021, A look back at what happened the last time and what can be done better this time. Who Do you Think You ARE! ? photo by Mackenzie Andersen “Who do you think you are?”, he said, as though I needed to be granted permission from an omnipotent authority to speak my mind freely.  He is over reacting, I thought. I had merely asked his friend if he was the person who works as an analyst for the State of Maine. No answer was forthcoming as the the public conversation was deleted and continued as private messaging commencing with this: Bad move to expose my friend like that. Please consider using discretion better if you want to remain friends. I just said OK. His next message began “Thank you”, seemingly interpreting “OK” as agreement that I would behave according to his instructions. I meant- OK, if asking the simple question means he will stop being friends with me, so be it. There was noth

Can progress come about without individualization?

The middle sector is the artist’s focal point in this sculpture from the Bronze Age, raised from below and burdened from above -  Public Domain \ Published on Mediim's Data Driven Investor as Were Itinerant Craftsmen Free Agents During the Bronze Age and Why Does it Matter? The middle sector is the artist’s focal point in this sculpture from the Bronze Age, raised from below and burdened from above -  Public Domain Prior to the 1930’s when Australian archaeologist, V Gordon Childe, presented his theory about the metal smiths of the Bronze Age and their concomitant relationship to the power elite, archaeologists considered craft making merely as a result of economics. Childe identified the powerful role that prestige goods played in the early development of craft specialization and connected the emergence of craft specialists with an itinerant metallurgist culture in prehistoric Europe. A debate emerged around the social and political role that specialized craft prod